


My Hands Are Hers

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Darth Vader (Comics), Star Wars: Queen's Peril - E. K. Johnston, Star Wars: Queen's Shadow - E. K. Johnston
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Star Wars: Queen's Shadow, Post-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25956172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: The Woman Who Was Once Sabé Of Naboo (and never would be again) shielded her eyes against the corona of blinding sun that flared around Appenza Peak like a warning:May the Force be with all who dare summit me. Alderaan was still green, still growing. Still alive.---Or, Sabé once gave up even her own name to be the other half of Padmé. Now Padmé is gone and the Galaxy with it, and Sabé is left alone to drown in her grief. Not alone: Padmé had allies. So Sabé heads to Alderaan.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala & Bail Organa, Padmé Amidala & Sabé, Padmé Amidala/Sabé
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	My Hands Are Hers

**001.**  
The Woman Who Was Once Sabé Of Naboo (and never would be again) shielded her eyes against the corona of blinding sun that flared around Appenza Peak like a warning: _May the Force be with all who dare summit me_. Alderaan was still green, still growing. Still alive.

If The Woman closed her eyes, it would feel as though nothing had changed since her last trip to the planet almost ten years before. So she did not close her eyes, even though the light burned with the ferocity of a second sun heading straight toward the cragged mountains that ringed Aldera. The rational, tactical part of her that had been Sabé of Naboo knew that it was only logical that the birds still sang sweetly on the evening air and the scent of starblossoms tickled her nose. The musical little girl who had been Tsabin even found it glad that there was still beauty in the Galaxy, and especially here, in the cradle of the Alderaanian palace where—

 **002.**  
No.

The Woman could not feel any of those things. She had never been an emotional person. And she was not an emotional person now. She was a raw nerve in human skin.

"I thought I heard your shuttle." The doors to the balcony opened and closed again behind The Woman, Bail Organa's steady footfalls measured on the stone as though were still leading Clones to march. More deaths, or as good as. He stood to her side and watched the sun set over Appenza in shared silence. It was the mountain that had stolen his wife's heart, in the most literal way. Bail Organa lived in its shadow whether here on this terrace or in his Senatorial apartments on Coruscant. The Woman could understand that, and she respected him for it.

She found her voice at last once the planet's single sun disappeared over the horizon. Night on Alderaan was much darker than that on Naboo. Night just about anywhere was darker than that on Coruscant, with its trillions of lights and lives humming—even now, with the enforcement of an Imperial curfew. The moonless sky above Alderaan let the stars shine all the more brightly.

They reminded The Woman Who Was Once Sabé of the white blossoms that landed in Padmé's curls during the procession.

Her throat burned.

"Could I have—"

"No." Bail's eyes were closed, too, against the light of the stars when she finally turned her head to look. "Not in the end."

"I don't believe that." The Woman's voice was harsher than Sabé's had been, or Tsabin's, or Amidala's. She waited until Bail Organa looked back at her. "Sabé existed to keep her alive. Whatever it meant, it would have been worth it to her. To me. My hands were hers." She looked down at the hands in question, small and unadorned on the terrace balustrade. Beside her smallest finger, a starblossom opened its petals, welcoming the change from day to night. "My heart was hers."

 **003.**  
"I offered my heart when Breha was in surgery," Bail said. He was a big man, and beside The Woman, he shifted to rest his weight on the balustrade, unshaven face in his hands. "Her mother, the last Queen, was still alive then, and she told me advice that I never believed until now, when I have the unfortunate opportunity to give it to you." He sighed. "You two have the same heart. It has always existed in two bodies, and now it feels heavier because you have to carry it alone. But it is still the same heart, and she needs you to keep it beating. You can still give your life to her, if that is what you want. 

"But…" Bail Organa paused. "If I overstep, please blame sleep deprivation. I know how much she loved you, and how highly she thought of you. She was not a person who thought highly of very many, in the end. And I do not think that she would want you to be… held back from your full potential in the way she realized she had been. In her last days. When it was too late."

Small, unadorned fingers tightened on the smooth Alderaani flagstone. 

"She was brilliant," The Woman Who Was Once Sabé bit into the blue-gold air. "She saved whole planets. Billions of beings. Even with one hand tied behind her back." She laughed without any joy. She doubted that she would ever feel joy again. "Imagine being so afraid of one woman's power that you destroyed the Galaxy just to ensure that she could never oppose you again." She looked out towards the edge of the world, dotted here and there with the lights of homes and passing speeders, and she could just make out the forbidding spire of Appenza Peak against the sky. "He killed her, Bail. I'm sure of it. The Padmé I knew would never just lie down and die."

"A great many things happened on that day that I know in my bones would never have happened," Bail said. He stood again to his full height. "And yet they did. However—" He held up both hands as though to shield himself from an impending sucker-punch, "I admit that I have much to learn about my folly in underestimating Sheev Palpatine. It will take years of unraveling my own ignorance to find the holes he slipped through right before my eyes to set this catastrophe in motion."

The kernel of a little girl called Tsabin who had lost her dearest friend looked up, up, up into Bail Organa's kind, staid face. "Is it selfish that in this moment, I only care about avenging Padmé, and not avenging the Galaxy?"

He rested a warm hand on her shoulder. The Woman let him. "It is an indulgence that she knew all too well. Don't make the same mistake as Anakin Skywalker and confuse your love with your need for revenge. Padmé is beyond your protection now." He squeezed her arm once. "But there are those who will need it more than ever to live through the coming years."

A coven of thrantas swooped past, and they keened mournfully into the still night.

"Can I see her?"

 **004.**  
"She should be awake now." Bail let his hand fall from The Woman's arm at last. A small, but very real, smile crossed his face. "She always is at this hour."

The interior of the Royal Palace of Alderaan was still beautifully appointed with luxurious furnishings and art—but unlike the terrace outside, it had undeniably changed since the last time The Woman Who Once Was Sabé of Naboo had been there. More guardswomen in Queen Breha's favored deep violet stood watchful and motionless at the ingress and egress of every room. Many of the large-paned windows of centuries old, rippled, poured sandglass had already been reinforced with blasterproof transparisteel. A gold-toned protocol droid knelt in one of the rooms they passed, muttering to itself as it pieced together a toy bouncing chair from Agunnaryd.

A _very_ familiar little blue-and-white astromech beeped in surprise and whirred up to The Woman's side.

 **005.**  
"Hello, Artoo," she said, softly. She rested her hand on its warm silver dome. 

**006.**  
The droid beeped at her and bade her follow, so The Woman crossed the threshold from the public palace to the private, where the floors changed from hard conifer wood to a soft plush pile that would cushion tiny knees in a few months when they learned to crawl.

That should happen in a stone house in the mountains outside Varykino, not here in the shadow of Appenza's deadly peak. 

Alderaan is beautiful and warm and safe, but it is not home. But is Naboo still home without her? Naboo, a planet that The Girl Who Was Sabé had helped to save once and over again with her because it was worth saving, then, worth protecting—the kind of planet that bore and nurtured girls like her, who knew when to stand and when to kneel and always to fight.

Anger bloomed in The Woman's chest again.

She never would have just lain down to die. She would have fought, she would have, she would have.

 **007.**  
The Woman has tried so hard not to blame this baby for killing her.

 **008.**  
But one of them was alive and one of them was dead. 

The Galaxy had been at war for years: The Woman Who Was Once Sabé learned to frame the world in losers and victors, the death toll, the saved. _She_ once tried to teach The Woman about the Jedi philosophy of balance, that the villagers who survived would carry on the life Force of the clones who died to free them, that _no one is ever really gone_ , that the death and destruction all around them would be answered with hope and light.

But all of that had been a lie, hadn’t it. The Jedi were all gone now, and the Empire rose in their stead. Hope had been replaced with the crushing weight of tyranny.

And she was gone.

Replaced by a girl who would never know her, in a world where she did not exist—

Already, even on Naboo, her memory had become verboten. The Chancellor was from Naboo, too, and he seemed to take her image as a personal slight although they had been allies once. Her statue had fallen in Theed Square only days after the planetary funeral procession brought out millions more souls than had attended the first Grand Imperial Inauguration Parade. Her portraits were ordered destroyed in the palace—

But The Woman knew that they had not been. Mariek veiled them instead in black mourning shrouds. Mariek had loved her, too, had loved them all in her own way.

Quarsh himself had announced the edict, _she was a traitor to the cause of the Republic and so is an enemy to the Empire_. 

They had all been wrong to trust him.

But that, The Woman feared, was the true balance of a Galaxy at war: your allies and advisors would happily dance on your grave just to gain more power, and the child you bore was the most dangerous enemy of them all, ready to tear you apart from inside your own body. And what was left after that? What counterweight could right the scales after such a betrayal?

 _009._  
Queen Breha Organa, the beating heart of Alderaan, emerged from a dim corridor like a beacon, stirring The Woman from her dark and vengeful reverie. Her pulmonodes glowed like the candleflowers outside and the endless-bright Alderaanian constellations, no moonlight to outshine them in the velvet of the sky. She looked tired, but brilliant. Beaming.

There was a similarity of countenance between she and Her, although they looked nothing alike, not really. It was the carriage of power and assurance, the knowledge that the lives of billions were at her mercy.

And mercy, maybe, was in that shared look, too.

It was something that The Woman never had, even when she was otherwise her identical twin. 

They were interchangeable, but they never were the same woman.

Maybe once upon a very long time ago, a girl called Tsabin could have been merciful.

The Woman will have none.

"It's good to see you," Queen Breha Organa murmured, hushed in the half-light. "I wish it were under better circumstances."

The Woman couldn't speak, not even simple pleasantries; her voice was caught in her throat.

 **010.**  
Blocking the light from Breha's pulmonodes like a dark eclipse was the baby.

 **011.**  
The baby blinked up at The Woman with wide-open eyes that saw more than a baby should: the depth of them made something cruel and pained finally, finally, finally unfurl from the base of The Woman's spine, some ache that she had carried since half of her died alone and in pain. 

_Please, Sabé_ , whispers her voice in the ether somewhere that might just be the Force, if The Woman believed in it: and she might now, because Sabé can hear her, clear as when they shared a bed in the Palace as they hatched the plan to become one person, she can hear Padmé say— _Please, Sabé. Guard my daughter._

The baby's mouth opens and closes softly, wide-open eyes following someone whom Sabé cannot see as they cross the floor. The scent of star-of-sharaya blossoms overwhelms The Woman Who Could Be Sabé and she almost raises an arm to cover her mouth and nose with the heavy veil of dark fabric she swathed herself in before landfall on Alderaan.

A glance at Bail and Breha Organa proves that they can smell it, too, the same tiny white petals that adorned her hair in the death procession. 

But The Woman can smell the baby, too, a sweet-milk smell and powdery soap. She makes a tiny sound. 

**012.**  
When Sabé sees the baby's fingers for the first time, how tiny and alive and perfect they are, she knows that she cannot be angry with this child just for being alive. Her life is what Padmé fought the Galaxy tooth and nail to blossom: this being of pure Light and potential and goodness who does not know about war, or loss, or terror, or the simple fact that _things were not always this way_. This girl-child is Padmé bounding onto Sabé's bed that first night to plan how to rule a planet with mercy and strength. Is Padmé stepping out into danger with only the weapon of belief to kneel before a hostile ruler and apologize for sins that were not her own. Is Padmé always reaching out with her whole heart laid bare to find others who believed the Galaxy could be a better place.

She didn't usurp Padmé or take her place.

She is Padmé's next and last gift to the Galaxy, another act of devotion to what it could be, in saying _this child will grow up to be what you make her; make her kind and strong and smart, make her a leader who holds her heart in her hands_. 

She is Padmé's ultimate expression of _hope_.

The Woman Who Was Once Sabé Of Naboo, And Just Might Be Forever, reaches out and touches one finger to the baby's tiny palm, and fingers clasp around it tight-tight-tight. An anchor.

"What is her name?"

**Author's Note:**

> WHOO IS THIS PURPLE PROSE, but YOU KNOW WHAT? I had FEELINGS after reading Queen's Shadow and Queen's Peril and now the current run of VADER, so I just feelings'd it out!


End file.
